We’re happy to be revisiting an existing article and covering one of our favourite topics for the third time. They say the third time is lucky, and if you’re fluent in emoji you will have deciphered what has occurred, an airdrop of the LOOK$ token.
This airdrop is one of the low risk – high reward opportunities which we predicted would occur in last years eponymous article. This is the third time a reward is being received, so let’s dive in and see what we’re getting!
Disclaimer: NOT FINANCIAL NOR INVESTMENT ADVICE. Only you are responsible for any capital-related decisions you make and only you are accountable for the results.
The first reward stemming from the article was the dYdX airdrop. As announced only yesterday dYdX plans to upgrade in 2022 to it’s 4th version. “Beginning with dYdX V4, dYdX Trading Inc. will not operate any part of the protocol. As a result, it will no longer receive revenue based on trading fees from the protocol. The same is true for all other centralized parties”. dYdX has had the third largest revenue out of any DeFi protocol in the past 365 days, with over 250million USD in revenue over 2021.’ If this revenue goes to the token holders, it will be significant fundamental improvement making it a revenue generating asset, and should help the token recover.
But onto the new rewards! One of the other activities we predicted would lead to an airdrop was using OpenSea to buy and sell NFTs. To be exact:
“the amount of tokens users would receive was calculated as a mix of core actions such as buying and/or selling NFTs within a certain period”
The above has already rewarded us once, with The OpenDao (a new protocol) airdropping their tokens to wallets that had interacted with OpenSea. This airdrop wasn’t particularly exciting and can be claimed until June 2022. The updated details have been added to the original article as well.
As mentioned at the start though, the third time is lucky, and the airdrop of LOOKS, the token for the LooksRare marketplace is much more significant. This is due to the token holders receiving 100% of the revenue from the LooksRare marketplace. And yes, the marketplace is fully operational – you’ll have to use it to claim the airdrop, if you’re eligible. Why is this airdrop so interesting?
1 – Fully functioning marketplace which is a viable alternative to OpenSea
2 – Using the marketplace for your NFT purchases, leads to you receiving rewards in LOOKS. A familiar equivalent – credit card cashback.
3 – Current sentiment towards OpenSea.
The combination of the above leads to a unique condition. NFT buyers and sellers are being financially incentivised to use the LooksRare platform, whilst receiving the same quality of service they expect from OpenSea, but with the hidden benefit of being able to ‘stick it’ to OpenSea. The best part of this is that the rewards come directly from the flat market fee (2%) on transactions, as 100% of the revenue is redistributed to the token holders who have their tokens staked.
Additionally from a game theory aspect, trading on LooksRare is incentivized as daily token emissions are split between active traders based on their volume that day. Simply put, for the next year a certain amount of LOOKS tokens will be distributed daily to anyone who bought and sold NFTs that day. The amount of tokens received on the day the user was active is based on the volume of their purchases and sales. In the table below you can see how the emissions are structured, the daily rewards halve every 30, 90, 140 and 361 days.
This structure also incentivizes traders to move over to LooksRare, as they can trade exactly as they would on OpenSea, but now receive significant rewards in LOOKS tokens. This has led to ‘wash trading’, with people buying and selling the same NFT for the first price to increase their volume and claim rewards, without actually speculating on the NFTs value. This of course comes at a cost, gas fees, marketplace fees and also royalty fees. The pre-determined association of negative values with the term ‘wash trading’ is simply wrong in this case. Pre-determined associations or opinions are wrong in most cases, and an open mind is key in all things. As mentioned from the above, trading comes with all those associated fees, which add up as your volume increases. As the rewards for trading volume are distributed between everyone, it is uncertain how many rewards will be received. In turn wash traders are competing against each other, and each new participant leads to even more distributed rewards. All of this is a flywheel which benefits the simple NFT buyer and seller who has their airdrop staked, and is receiving rewards – stemming from the volume brought by the new participants. This in turn is network theory, and is how a protocol grows.
The above animation depicts exponential growth in a network. If you think each dot which appears is a new user in the network and the size of their dot is how much volume in transactions they have done you can quickly see how the network can grow.
If someone was to say that LooksRare is a vampire attack on OpenSea, they would not be mistaken. The possibilities for such a scenario to occur are extremely unlikely, it required OpenSea to squander their first mover advantage and the NFT communities’ good will. To list of their missteps is long – insider trading, bad uptime, atrocious customer service, increasingly moving to turn into OpenSea into a private company. On top of that, an extremely skilled development team was required, that was also ethical and altruistic enough to ‘give away’ the revenue. The level of coordination and preparation required to have everything ready to go upon launch (token airdrop, marketplace, staking and liquidity providing) is exceptional and noteworthy.
LooksRare is not a ‘vampire attack’. It is a protocol that adapted to the current market circumstances in order to attract users (OpenSea having > 80% of the NFT market share), with an ethos that aligns with crypto ideologies (ownership of the products the user uses, no VCs). Both of these aspects were highlighted by the current inadequacies present in NFT marketplaces.
From the tokenomics you will see an excellent distribution. They are extremely simple, with the expected allocations for treasuries and liqudity. A very small presale of 3.3% is notable, and makes sense, with the team retaining only 10% (3 times the private sale). Lastly and most importantly, 75% of the tokens go directly to NFT traders and users of the platform. Notice how the Staking and Trading Rewards are much larger than the airdrop. This is to incentivise usage and not simply ‘dead claimants’. This refers to people who claim their airdrops and then never interact with the protocol again. With claiming the airdrop requiring the user to list an NFT on the marketplace, and with staking also implemented, it encourages participants to interact with the protocol and lock up their tokens to receive extra rewards. These are ‘behavioural hooks’ forcing the new user to break the ‘participation barrier’. Simply put – you’re more likely to do something for the first time if there’s a reward for doing so. And, as everyone knows, once you’ve done something once, it’s much easier to do it again. To illustrate this, watch the very cute 30 second video below:
The best time to use the marketplace is within the first 30 days as the rewards are significantly increased as covered above. For someone looking to buy their first NFT, the choice to use LooksRare is clear, as they will receive some LOOKS tokens in return. With tokenomics this community oriented, and a team talented enough to ‘ship’ all of these products so quickly, it looks like OpenSea has stiff competition. The marketplace fight this year will be extremely eventful, and also profitable as this might further push OpenSea to release a token.
Eligibility, Claiming and How Much?
You must have 3 ETH trading volume or more on Opensea in the 6 month window between 16th Jun 2021 to 16th Dec 2021. Once an eligible user lists an NFT for sale on LooksRare, they will be able to claim the airdrop. We have checked the website, and claiming the tokens is safe, and we highly reccomend you do so if you are eligible – we have claimed our airdrop and staked the tokens.
To check if you are eligible go to https://looksrare.org, connect your wallet, and clicking “check now” in the big green banner at the top of the page. If it says “No tokens to claim”, you don’t meet the eligibility criteria.
The Airdrop Duration has not been specified, but the claiming window should remain open for at least 7 days (starting from 10/01/2022, ending on 17/01/2022).
The delay in publication of this airdrop is due to the airdrop banner disappearing from the website every now and then. We checked with members on Fridays’ AMA and they confirmed that refreshing the page and checking it multiple times would lead to the banner appearing.
You can check to see how many tokens you can expect to be able to claim from the table below.
*Only volume on ETH was counted. The only genuine LOOKS Token contract address is: 0xf4d2888d29d722226fafa5d9b24f9164c092421e
LOOKS is an ERC-20 token, currently only on the Ethereum blockchain.
Conclusions
If you’ve made it this far, the next logical question is what is PoF planning to do with their airdrop tokens. We have decided to stake our tokens as this will allow for us to gather more tokens passively, whilst also having no risk of losing any of our tokens. Additionally, for any NFT transactions on the ETH network, use of LooksRare will be prioritised, to claim the volume rewards of LOOK. The potential for the token is adequately outlined, and with only one day of trading so far, with much of it being wash trading to maximise reward accrual it is too early for a price projection. However as outlined above the marketplace and associated token have massive potential. Having received it as an airdrop allows us to have risk free exposure, and with such potential holding it makes the most sense. The marketplace wars are definitely a topic that we will revisit.